Tag: journey
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Keep eating less salt!
This week is salt awareness week. It’s one of my personal weakness. It’s also a silent killer. Last year I worked with a group of fabulous researchers led by Dr. Oyebode to make sense of the impact of salt in Africa, Nigeria in particular. The love for salt in the region is a silent epidemic.…
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Keep Nkiruka or the endless possibilities of the vaccine in mind!
This one is heavy. I cried today. There is light at the end of the tunnel. I passed through it and cried. Nkiruka or what is ahead with life is greater. So too with the COVID-19 vaccine I received today. I cried when my turn arrived. We have been waiting for this day for awhile…
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Keep the silent stillness of motherhood!
She maybe the first to wake up. The last to sleep. The first to soothe the tears or shield the pain. The last to cry her tears or open the hurt. Mothering is both a skill and art. The first is popular. From knowing how to nurture connections with a new life, with the life…
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Keep the ‘multiple selves’ of women in mind!
A picture I saw the other day on social media, depicted the many ways women work. Not only does she tend the cow, she cooks it too. Not only does she grow her own food, she buys them from the market too. Not only does she tend to her children, she tends to the home…
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Keep knowing that the future belongs to young people!
I have been thinking lately about the future. Reimagining the possibilities on one’s own terms. I imagine that our minds and gaze in opposition, are liberated and transformed for greatness. Our desires, agency and voice disrupts any fixation to hold us down to any preconceived notion of what it means to excel. Language is at…
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Keep Nkemjika in mind, whether you succeed or fail!
One of the first priorities I learnt early on in academia was survival. Armed with the determination that my career and journey would have shape, I enlisted the support of other women and men too. Maybe it’s the fact that they were women, mothers themselves, women or men of color, I knew they would lay…
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Keep reminding children that they are enough!
Representation as with stories for black children, have been controlled by others for far too long. For our children to thrive, we really must write about ourselves in other to reclaim our stories, our way of life. As long as others direct attention and conversations surrounding the experiences of all children, as long as their…
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Keep the distinctive culture-bearing power of grandmothers!
I grew up in a family dominated by authoritative and assertive women. I remember my grandmother, a no-nonsense woman, who would bathe you, feed you, or love and hug you with one arm, and spank you with the other if you misbehaved. Women like my grandmother were never afraid to speak their mind. She was…
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Keep persisting with mothering love!
I have got three bright sons, one barely 7 months old, the other 4 years of age, and my first, 6 years old. Like most mothers raising black boys in America, I fear always, like I am raising targets. No amount of my education, my gender or even class, can protect my sons from the…
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Keep being an instrument of Peace!
Can one become an instrument of Peace? The prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi insists it is possible. So does the late Dr. Howard Thurman, the former spiritual mentor of the late Dr. Martin Luther King. That we can pray to become an instrument of Peace, was something he described ‘as the most insistent conditions…
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Keep knowing who you are!
‘Do you know who you are without what you do?’ These words were spoken often during my doctoral studies at Penn State University by my doctoral advisor, Dr. Collins Airhihenbuwa. To him, our research identities, often influenced the research we conducted. If all you see is what you do, he would go on to say,…
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Keep telling stories!
I have been reading lately about stories. About the story of stories. About the importance of telling stories. Those you pass on and those you don’t. Those told about you, and those you tell. Those that provide opportunities to be and become the Other. Those that are our guide, those that direct us, for without…
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Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor 